Record-breaking floods in many places in the world in recent years have underlined the need for accurate flood forecasting models. By knowing in advance when, where and at what level a river will crest, appropriate protection works can be planned and damage to life and property can be reduced. This book presents a streamflow model technique, which has been adopted by various hydrological forecasting services. The physics-based structural-stochastic forecasting model is formulated with discrete data, accounts for model uncertainties, is adaptive, and mathematically accessible. The reader is guided gradually through the model building and forecasting process and through the generation of the relevant system matrices with the enclosed MATLAB codes. The many examples and sample inflow and outflow data illustrate real life flow routing problems in Europe and the US and allow, with the adaptable MATLAB codes, the simulation of streamflows and the creation of real-time hydrological forecasts.

This volume was developed as course material for hydroinformatics, surface hydrology and water management courses. It is moreover intended for hydrologists and civil, environmental and agricultural engineers, who are involved with flood forecasting and water resources management. A CD-ROM with MATLAB codes is included.

Dr. András Szöllösi-Nagy is a Professor of Hydrology. He currently also serves as the Rector of the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft, The

Netherlands. Before, he was the director of the Division of Water Sciences and the Secretary of the International Hydrological Programme (IHP) of UNESCO, Paris. He holds a Civil Engineering degree, a Dr. Techn. (Summa cum Laude) in Hydrology and Mathematical Statistics, a PhD in hydrology from the Budapest University of Technology and a DSc in water resources systems control from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has served in various international scientific boards and has worked as a scientist and professor in hydrological modeling and forecasting at several universities in the world.

Dr. József Szilágyi is a Professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary and a research hydrologist at the University of Nebraska-

Lincoln, USA. His education and training is in meteorology and hydrology. He completed his PhD at the University of California-Davis, USA, in 1997. In his early carrier he worked as an operational hydrometeorologist at the National Hydrological Forecasting Service in Hungary. Later he got involved in studying watershed hydrology, land-atmosphere and stream-aquifer interactions. His current activities focus on developing spatially distributed evapotranspiration estimation methods using standard weather and satellite-derived remote sensing data.

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r e c u r s i v e streamflow forecastinga state–space approach

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recursive streamflo

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unesco-ihe lecture note series